Images of the mind

Ed Young
Beyond the Great Mountains:
A Visual Poem about China
Chronicle Books, 2005

Beyond the Great Mountains is a meditative, absorbing book. Like a Chinese landscape painting, Ed Young's aesthetic is sparing in words and images. We, too, must bring our discipline and restraint to reading this book. Only that way, will we appreciate its richness. Young brings his design sensibility to bear on a series of cascading paper collages that draw upon Chinese characters. "East" (dōng 東) is pictured as a great tree silhouetted against a tangerine sun. "Boulder" (shí 石) is a great waterfall plunging from the edge of a cliff. The collage papers are alternately richly dyed, fibrous, mottled, printed, and, if you excuse the pun, absorbing.

Author's website: http://edyoungart.com/

Write Chinese

Peggy Goldstein

Hu Is a Tiger: 

An Introduction to Chinese Writing

Scholastic, 1996

Peggy Goldstein is author of the similar book, Lóng Is a Dragon, which teaches the basics of Chinese language and writing to novices. Hu Is a Tiger uses the same engaging strategies for picturing, remembering, and reproducing characters and portions of character that may be combined to form new words. In this book, Goldstein includes numbers, zodiac animals, auspicious words, and a carefully selected range of vocabulary for forming sentences. She concludes with an important idea: 人人明白仁 rénrén míngbái rén. Everyone understands benevolence.

Water-breathing dragon

Grace Chang (author)
Chong Chang (illustrator)
Jin Jin the Dragon
Enchanted Lion, 2007

Born of a 1000-year old egg, a young hatchling asks nearby animals who he is. They recognize parts of themselves in the creature whose golden color inspires them to dub him Jin Jin, but they cannot answer his question. Thus, Jin Jin begins a quest to learn his identity. Along the way, he encounters more friendly animals and deciphers clues in the form of early Chinese script. At tale's end, Jin Jin saves a village from drought and in the process realizes that he is a water-breathing dragon. Readers learn a little Chinese and the true, beneficent nature of Chinese long 龍, or dragons.

Hybrid alphabet

Maywan Shen Krach (author)
Hongbin Zhang (illustrator)
D is for Doufu: An Alphabet Book of Chinese Culture)
Shen's Books, 1997

Maywan Shen Krach's introduction to Chinese culture is organized like an alphabet book with a single entry per letter (excepting i, u, and v), but it would more appropriate to think of it as a very select and idiosyncratic encyclopedia. For each letter, we encounter a term, such as ai (love), naohuadeng (lantern parade), xiaoshun (filial piety), or zhongguo (China). The terms are given in Chinese (written in a red cartouche), in pinyin, and in English translation. Following that, the author sometimes offers an explanation of the visual components of the character, which is at times illuminating (che), at other times less so (wo). Two or more short paragraphs then explain the term. The content is uneven as when the author relates the pipa to the American blues guitar without recognizing that both trace their origins to a common middle eastern musical ancestor. I was also disappointed in the quality of the writing, which unfortunately did not enliven the subjects. The divergent illustrations, too, seemed in need of some editorial direction. Still, the concept is an interesting one, and perhaps worth another visit.

Speak Chinese

Katy R. Kudela
My First Book of Mandarin Chinese Words
Capstone, 2010

This book is not going transform your little one into a bi-lingual wunderkind, but it is a colorful and attractive enticement for learning the mandarin Chinese names for people and objects around the house, on the farm, in town, and in a school room. It's hard for me to imagine learning accurate pronunciation from Romanization alone. But, if you have access to the internet, though, you may easily make up for the most obvious deficiency in this book. For best results, you will probably want to start your child before age 4. Jiayou 加油!

More on Chinese characters

 Catherine Louis (author and illustrator) and Feng Xiao Min (calligrapher)
Liu and the Bird: A Journey in Chinese Calligraphy
North-South, 2006

Huy Voun Lee

In the Leaves

Henry Holt, 2005

  Here are two books that embed Chinese characters into narratives. Catherine Louis' beautifully illustrated book unfolds after a dream in which young Liu hears her grandfather calling. On her way to meet him, she encounters a child 子 by a river 川, a woman 女 in the fields 田, and a man 人 resting beneath a tree 休. Each two-page spread reveals a linocut and dyed paper image of gorgeous colors accompanied by a series of pictures that proceed from image to early Chinese script to modern characters. There is one error in the text: "shine 明" and "sun 日" are reversed. There is some inconsistency in traditional vs. simplified characters, and the implied links between pictures, early script, and standard characters are not all consistent with the archaeological record. And even though the story is a little thin and contrived to meet the highlighted vocabulary, I still enjoyed this beautiful book. One last note, there are some interesting suggestions for games and activities.

  Huy Voun Lee's In the Leaves has on its cover the compound for autumn (秋天 qiutian), and it is one of a set of four books with seasonal themes featuring Chinese characters. In this one, Xiao Ming and his friends visit a farm, where he teaches his friends the Chinese for things they encounter, such as grain 禾, fields 田, and pig 豕. Xiao Ming cleverly introduces more complex characters that use these characters as elements. For example, mouth 口 with grain 禾 make harmony 和. His friends respond to these lessons enthusiastically, and so do we. As with Louis' book, bilingual editorial scrutiny is needed. Inside the back cover, the pronunciation guide mistakenly gives the pronunciation for snake, "ssh'uh," for the word for pig 豕 zhu. Still, Lee's images are pure delight, and she makes Chinese characters accessible and fun to learn. 

School daze

Trish Marx and Ellen B. Senisi's book does cultural comparison brilliantly. Flip the book over, and on the opposite cover, you'll see a like group of lively Chinese kindergartners. Each half of the book takes us from morning welcome at 9 am, through lessons, lunchtime, and recess, to learning how to get along and wondering about the kids on the other side of our planet. The text and pictures make clear that while we might be different superficially, we share common human traits: love of learning, joy in physical activities, and desire for respect and friendship. The Chinese half provides a handful of vocabulary words in context, such as laoshi 老師 (teacher).

Trish Marx and Ellen B. Senisi
Kindergarten Day USA and China: A Flip-Me-Over Book
Charlesbridge, 2010

The character of characters

The Chinese written language, which uses graphs instead of an alphabet, is a perennial source of fascination, but also frustration. Here are two books that minimize the frustration and invite English-speaking children (and their adult hangers-on) into that language.


Christoph Niemann's The Pet Dragon: A Story about Adventure, Friendship, and Chinese Characters reminds me of PBS' "Wordworld" program. Niemann selects Chinese characters with strong pictographic qualities and then merges the characters with the illustration. Thus, the two bold strokes of 人 overlap the image of the book's heroine, Lin, providing the reader with a visual association for the Chinese word for "person." Lin and her pet dragon take the reader through a world populated by similar character-image associations. Some work easily. For example, 木，林，森 represent the environment made of tree, woods, and forest in which Lin and the dragon play. Others are a stretch, like 長 as a hand touching the forehead in a gesture of seeing far into the distance to the Great Wall.


Niemann doesn't pretend to teach Chinese. (The book avoids pronunciation, for example.) Rather, his aim, as expressed in his "Dear Reader" letter, is to inspire us and our kids to take a class and learn Chinese. His story may at times seem constrained, but his clear, graphic illustrations do make the learning easy and fun.


If you enjoyed The Pet Dragon, and want another book to take you a bit further, try Peggy Goldstein's Lóng is a Dragon: Chinese Writing for Children. Again, there is the ubiquitous dragon promising excitement, power, and auspiciousness, but Goldstein's book does not unfold as a story. It is, instead, instructional, and in a mere 30 pages, she covers enormous historical, cultural, and linguistic ground. Here, we see in more detail the evolution of select characters from more pictorial, archaic forms to standard, modern ones. She discusses strokes and provides stroke order for writing characters ourselves. Then, she adds pronunciation (using the pinyin Romanization system). She loses no time and begins building on these basics showing us how characters may be combined to form new ones. Place an ear 耳 near a door 門, and you get 聞, which means "to listen." Or, juxtapose fire 火 with mountain 山 to form the compound word for volcano 火山. By the book's end, Goldstein has us writing (and translating) a sentence, and appreciating the auspicious, four-character phrases that typically adorn Chinese homes, restaurants, and commercial establishments. She concludes by bidding congratulations 恭喜 to her readers for their progress in learning Chinese. Goldstein should be congratulated, too, for her fine instruction.


Christoph Niemann
The Pet Dragon: A Story about Adventure, Friendship, and Chinese Characters
Green Willow Books, 2008

Peggy Goldstein

Lóng is a Dragon: Chinese Writing for Children

China Books & Periodicals, Inc., 1991